Norman MacCaig Quotes

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I like my male characters as much my female characters, but I always seem to have less for them to say.

I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.

My process is kind of intuitive - I think about how a character will speak according to their station and personality, occasionally making notes with guidelines for their mannerisms, and then I just sort of crack on and write it.

For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

I'm much more comfortable speaking through my characters' voices than my own.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.

I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

The hardest part of ghost writing other people's stories is capturing their voices so that it isn't you talking, it's them.

When people ask me about my dialogue, I say, 'Don't you hear people talking?' That's all I do. I hear a certain type of individual, I decide this is what he should be, whatever it is, and then I hear him. Well, I don't hear anybody that I can't make talk.

The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.

If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.